Nerd Fight over podcasting stats

I’m trying to come up with new ways to measure audience that goes way beyond whether someone downloaded my content to their machine. I have tens of gigabytes loaded here that I haven’t watched or listened to, and I bet I’m not the only one.

I’d rather go with engagement than just downloads. I believe advertisers will eventually get wiser and pay for audiences that’ll do things, not just download files with an automated client.

Anyway, most people don’t care about this, but anyone who makes content sure better be engaged on this issue cause it’s where the money will come by 2010.

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Robert Scoble

As Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company, Scoble travels the world looking for what's happening on the bleeding edge of technology for Rackspace's startup program. He's interviewed thousands of executives and technology innovators and reports what he learns in books ("The Age of Context," a book coauthored with Forbes author Shel Israel, has been released at http://amzn.to/AgeOfContext ), YouTube, and many social media sites where he's followed by millions of people. Best place to watch me is on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble
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Comments

The golden key is some kind of 1pixel gif embedded in the video stream so you can track it and send a report back to the ad buyers.

Looks like we will have to get some headz together for the next World Ad Congress http://www.iaaglobal.org and take over a panel or something. Any one? Any one?

We did a little trick at the Beijing world congress and created an unofficial world ad congress cocktail after hours, then merged this with the USA/China VC unofficial after hours cocktail party. Any one?

The golden key is some kind of 1pixel gif embedded in the video stream so you can track it and send a report back to the ad buyers.

Looks like we will have to get some headz together for the next World Ad Congress http://www.iaaglobal.org and take over a panel or something. Any one? Any one?

We did a little trick at the Beijing world congress and created an unofficial world ad congress cocktail after hours, then merged this with the USA/China VC unofficial after hours cocktail party. Any one?

[…] First from Steve Safran at Lost Remote, via Scoble, is this commentary sparked by the zeFrank/Rocketboom nerd fight. Lost Remote TV Blog “There’s simply no way for us to measure viewership of podcasts. But we keep reporting numbers from the networks, big sites and podcasters without questioning them (guilty as charged) and we need to step back for a moment and ask: “How do we figure out who is really watching or listening to our podcasts?” Then we have to admit “We don’t know.” […]

[…] Steve Safran of Lost Remote posted a fascinating piece this morning entitled “PodCast Math – We don’t know what we don’t know” His launching point was a discussion of the ZeFrank vs Andrew Baron controversy we’ve discussed on these pages and Scoble has on others, but the real gist of the argument was that because we can’t say authoritatively that an individual, once they’ve downloaded an audio or video podcast, we have no true measure of viewership or listenership. […]

[…] Scoble chimes in and suggests our new metric should be “engagement” I’d rather go with engagement than just downloads. I believe advertisers will eventually get wiser and pay for audiences that’ll do things, not just download files with an automated client. […]

This would probably require media players to send back view tracking information (or at the very least have embedded links that can be tracked) which means it could well cause a stink in terms of privacy – plus how will the viewer directly/immediately benefit from providing all this information? Perhaps the ‘people who liked this, also liked this stuff’, assuming there’s not a patent on that already.

This would probably require media players to send back view tracking information (or at the very least have embedded links that can be tracked) which means it could well cause a stink in terms of privacy – plus how will the viewer directly/immediately benefit from providing all this information? Perhaps the ‘people who liked this, also liked this stuff’, assuming there’s not a patent on that already.